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, Persia, the East and West Indies, and the North American continent, often with peculiar geographical results. But neither Mrs. Aubin nor Mrs. Haywood was able to use the gorgeous local color that distinguished Mrs. Behn's "Oroonoko," and still less did they command the realistic imagination that could make the travels of a Captain Singleton lifelike. Even when, as in "The Mercenary Lover," the setting is transferred to "the Metropolis of one of the finest Islands in the World," and the action takes place "in the neighborhood of a celebrated Church, in the Sound of whose Bells the Inhabitants of that populous City think it an Honour to be born,"[9] the change is unaccompanied by any attempt at circumstantial realism. We are told that Belinda of "The British Recluse" is a young lady of Warwickshire, that Fantomina follows her lover to Bath in the guise of a chambermaid, or that "The Fair Hebrew" relates the "true, but secret history of two Jewish ladies who lately resided in London," but without the labels the settings could not be distinguished from the vague and unidentified _mise en scene_ of such a romance as "The Unequal Conflict." Placentia in England raves of her passion for Philidore exactly as Alovisa in Paris, Emanuella in Madrid,[10] or Cleomelia in Bengal expose the raptures and agonies of their passions. The hero of "The Double Marriage" (1726) rescues a distressed damsel in the woods outside of Plymouth exactly as one of Ariosto's or Spenser's knights-errant might have done in the fairy country of old romance. In the sordid tale of "Irish Artifice," printed in Curll's "Female Dunciad" (1728), no reader could distinguish in the romantic names Aglaura and Merovius the nationality or the meanness of a villainous Irish housekeeper and her son. And though the tale is the very reverse of romantic, it contains no hint of actual circumstance. The characters in Mrs. Haywood's early fiction move in an imaginary world, sometimes, it is true, marked with the names of real places, but no more truly realistic than the setting of "Arcadia" or "Parthenissa." Nor are the figures that people the eighteenth century paradise of romance more definitely pictured than the landscape. They are generally unindividualized, lay figures swayed by the passions of the moment, or at best mere "humour" characters representing love's epitome, extravagant jealousy, or eternal constancy. Pope could make a portrait specific by the vigorous
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